The present application relates to techniques to present documentation in an electronic format, such as in a web browser or on an electronic reader. There are many reasons to want to be able to provide documentation in an electronic format. For example, one common reason is to provide technical documentation and manuals in a searchable way to users of technology products.
The standard approach for authoring information is to create reusable components (or chunks) of information that have affinity with some other components. Conventionally, this results in two types of presentations for documents. One approach is provide the entirety of the content as a single monolithic document (e.g., as a book), which may run into a large number of pages (such as a PDF file). A table of contents or index may be used to navigate to a desired location within the document, but one key disadvantage with this approach is that it is restricted to producing a single large all-or-nothing document. In addition, this presentation type is deficient because readers are not able to easily locate information relevant to their situation within the single large document.
Another approach is to create a fragmented document that keeps each and every portion of the document (e.g., the document sections and sub-sections) as a separate and distinct entity. When viewing a specific section of the document, “forward” and “back” buttons maybe used to navigate through the document. However, the drawback with this approach is that it breaks up the content into different sections that require the users to hunt and seek for the different portions of interest to the user, and therefore provides a presentation type that is not aligned with information-seeking behavior desired by users.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved approach to implement authoring and presentation of information to users in electronic formats.